


The Man In The Willow

by Her_Madjesty



Series: Twelve Days of Christmas - 2020 [6]
Category: Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
Genre: Alternative Universe - Folklore, Alternative Universe - Magic, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:13:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28041471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty
Summary: The night of her funeral, Hero watches the procession of townsfolks make their way past the front gates and into the family’s cemetery. Her own mausoleum – and isn’t that a thought? – is alight with vibrant colors and lights; a beacon in the darkness.At her side sits the Little Monk, her family’s monaciello. And he holds her hand, bless him, this creature no larger than her thumb, as the world passes her by.
Relationships: Hero/Don John (Much Ado About Nothing)
Series: Twelve Days of Christmas - 2020 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2037376
Comments: 12
Kudos: 20





	The Man In The Willow

**Author's Note:**

> On the sixth day of Christmas, a harried writer gave to thee...an AU where little creatures and dryads exist.
> 
> We're halfway through! As you can tell, I keep pushing my deadlines, but I'm doing my best to stay on track. This piece was not the one I intended to post today, as it required some substantial rewrites, but it was the one that felt right. It is distantly inspired by "The Bear and the Nightingale," which I encourage all of you to read with enthusiasm.
> 
> With that out of the way, I look forward to seeing you all on the 14th!

The night of her funeral, Hero watches the procession of townsfolks make their way past the front gates and into the family’s cemetery. Her own mausoleum – and isn’t that a thought? – is alight with vibrant colors and lights; a beacon in the darkness.

At her side sits the Little Monk, her family’s monaciello. And he holds her hand, bless him, this creature no larger than her thumb, as the world passes her by.

Hero has long known of the monaciello and his presence in their home. The Little Monk’s clan is spread far and wide throughout the villa, with generations stacking on top of one another to keep the business of the warm hearth, baking bread, and gentle threshold in check. She’d spent her childhood leaving gifts for the lot of them – warm milk, the crumbs from a freshly-baked loaf of bread. When Don Pedro and his soldiers first arrived, the monaciello feasted – if not for the offerings that the men left, then for the sheer breadth of food Hero was able to give him in her wake.

And now –

“What will happen to us, lady?” asks the monaciello, his voice no more than a whisper in the night. “Will your new life see your new lord and husband return our blessings to us?”

Hero wipes a stray tear from her cheek and feels the monaciello’s grip on her hand tighten.

“I had not thought him capable of violence before today, though I knew he was a soldier,” she says into the night. “Oh, but I was a fool.”

The monaciello shakes his head. “You were in love,” he corrects.

Hero bows her head. “And now the rose-colored glasses have been tossed aside.” She presses her free hand against her chest against the pain brewing there. There are bruises on the back on her legs, and her wrist twinges every few moments or so – all injuries that can be traced back to the once-noble Claudio.

Somewhere, in the night, he mourns her. All of Messina mourns her. But somewhere, near her father, a man reports that Don John, the prince’s half-brother, has fled from the port. And somewhere else, a man confesses that it was Don John who led the Lady Hero to her ruin.

The monaciello stays with Hero until the sun rises. Neither of them sleep. When Beatrice comes to collect Hero for her renewed wedding, it is to find her cousin staring listlessly into the distance, her eyes puffed from crying.

She will not marry Claudio when she greets him at the altar. Instead, she will baptize him with forgiveness, washing away his sins. Her father, in his shock, will not stop her as she bids him leave the house. Claudio, too, will go, as though struck by an angel or stuck in an unending, waking dream.

But Don Pedro’s men will bring an ashen Don John to the gates. And Hero, still in her wedding gown, will see him and come to understand his role in her losses. Her father will bid him to stay in their cells until Benedick – newly married, and Lord but the flush on Beatrice’s cheeks – can present those devices that will enlighten him to the lady’s suffering.

And in the moment – for she feels powerful; she feels heard; she feels seen – Hero will offer to take that duty onto herself.

And with the air of the day disrupted, the men will let her.

Don John will meet her gaze as she stands on the marital altar – and the light in his eyes will return, as will the color in his cheeks, but his eyes will darken with some manner of thing that Hero cannot bring herself to name.

*

Night comes to Messina. The would-be partygoers have departed back to their homes, prepared to tell the story of these strange days for decades to come. Beatrice beds with her husband, and Margaret has been dismissed, leaving Ursula, her mother, to look after her.

Thus, the stars find Hero alone.

Save for the monaciello.

“He has always been a ghost,” Hero says to him, staring up and into the darkness.

She is listless from lack of sleep, and perhaps that is why the monaciello brings his family to her side. Around her, these little creatures gather, winged and not; fanged and not; beautiful and not. They take her fingers, one by one, and move her towards the bed, where she can do nothing but stare listlessly at the ceiling.

“It will not do to imprison him here,” she says as the Little Monk presses a cold washcloth to her head (the whole of it nearly obscures his body; she would laugh if she had the air to do so). “He will only haunt us in the days to come.”

“The punishment is yours to deign, Lady Hero,” says the monaciello – and for a moment, he sounds like Benedick, putting on airs of honor. When Hero looks at him, he can only offer her a shrug and a smile that bears too many teeth for comfort.

“And what would you do?” she asks him and his lot. “What is the punishment you commit to those families who make you ghosts; steal your voices; deny you your place in the hearth?”

The monaciello’s expression darkens, but Hero does not fear for herself. Instead, for the first time this evening, she straightens, pushing herself up on her elbows as, around her, the Little Monk’s family murmurs to one another.

Finally, it is not the monaciello but his daughter who approaches her. She is no larger than Hero’s pinkie, and yet the anger in her eyes could burn down the whole of the villa.

“He wishes to be heard,” she says, her voice as high as the lark’s song. “He screams and he screams and he screams, even now, lady, so loud that the dogs are uneasy in their kennels. He is not a quiet ghost, your mischief-maker, but you may make him one. Just as he would have thought to make you.”

She glances out the window, bidding Hero to follow her gaze. Beyond the grapevines and the storage sheds, there is Messina’s sprawling forest, whipping in the wind from off the coast.

“Speak with the dryads, lady,” continues the monaciello’s daughter. “They will guide you to your revenge.”

(And it is this that almost stops her. For even in her pain, Hero is not a vengeful soul. Claudio has left the villa with her forgiveness in his chest; surely, surely Don John may merit the same. But the thought of it – those marching torches, that gag in her mouth, the scraping of gravel beneath her hands –)

Hero closes her eyes.

“In the morning, lady,” the monaciello tacks on, bidding his daughter away from the bed. “Sleep, now. We will watch over you.”

And Hero rests easier, knowing that they do.

*

Morning comes. Before the sun has a chance to rise above the horizon, Hero makes her way into the wood. She cuts her palms on wire and brush and lets that blood drip behind her, a trail for the dryads to follow.

The basket she bears on her arm is loaded with cinnamon and sugar; sweetness, the monaciello had advised, to go along with the sacrifice.

The dryads come to her. And as the sun comes up over the mountains of Sicily, they are able to strike an accord.

They speak with her, though, on her reasons as she walks. Hero would not have begrudged them before and does not do so now – her affairs belong in the world of men, after all, and this justice could well be seen to by Dogberry or some of his more affluent companions. But these magics, in contradiction with the faith of her upbringing but aligned with the sanctity of her house, feel proper. Right.

She is purging a poltergeist from her family’s midst. Where a priest had failed her, now the dryads would guide.

*

There is a willow tree not far from the estate, in between the cliffside, the wishing well, and the last row of grapes. There, some three days after his imprisonment, stands Don John with manacles behind his back and resignation in his eyes.

They are not alone, he and Hero – for propriety would not allow it. His half-brother is among the crowd of servants who have attended the trial; her father and uncle stand as stalwart guards at her back, supportive – this time willingly so – of her willful endeavor.

It is Benedick, though, with Beatrice at his side, who catches her before she approaches the tree. There are questions in his eyes, and Hero knows that she could answer them, but not here.

Not in front of this crowd.

But even so, Benedick asks.

“Are you certain, cousin?”

And he is not a squeamish man, Beatrice’s love, but he is a just one. He agreed to these punishments as she did. But even now, Hero can feel the doubt in his eyes reflected back in her heart.

She looks over to the story’s villain.

(And she does not know if Don John has heard the tales of the dryads in these woods. She can see them, though, lingering at the edge of the grove and in the branches of the willow. They are blood-hungry and beautiful and the mothers to a woman without one. But even so, Hero does not know if she wants to be one.)

She squeezes her new cousin’s hand and lets it drop back to his side. Benedick does not stop her again as she approaches her villain.

Don Pedro steps forward with her, one hand on the hilt of his sword.

Standing before Don John, Hero takes a needle from her dress’s pocket. She watches his eyes drop as she pricks one of her fingers, allowing the blood to well to the surface.

He only looks at her properly when she steps into his space; to the point where their breaths are intermingled.

(There was a kiss, once – his predator’s teeth against the back of her hand. And even now, set beneath her, there is the predator still – but a chastised one. A broken one.)

Hero drags her blood across Don John’s forehead and murmurs a prayer beneath her breath.

In between one heartbeat and the next, he is gone.

Hero falters, staring at the empty space, while above her, the willow to which they’ve bound him shudders with its newfound weight.

A great cheer takes up behind her – the staff, her cousin, and Don Pedro’s men all celebrating their victory over their villain. Hero looks back, lost in the face of what’s just occurred.

Don Pedro is the only one of her companions who meets her gaze without a smile. His expression is not grim, just tired, and he turns from the celebration before Benedick or any of his men can stop him.

Hero watches him go for a long moment. Then, Beatrice’s hand is in hers, and she allows herself to be dragged from the base of the willow and into the rest of the party’s celebrations.

The willow’s fronds whisp in the afternoon breeze, ignorant to the goings on of the world.

*

The aftermath of it all – the deaths, the failed weddings, the binding – is surprisingly quiet.

Hero sees the monaciello and his family less than she once did, their offers less luscious in the wake of Don Pedro’s slow exodus from the vineyard. His soldiers break off in twos and threes, and even Beatrice and Benedick bid the villa their farewells before he does. The newlyweds forgo a cart in favor of Benedick’s horse, which kicks up an impressive trail of dust as it takes them down the mountainside. Hero does not bother to hide her tears as her cousin disappears into the distance, but they are happy, she insists, to anyone who might listen.

(There are whispers, of course, about her own empty left hand. With no Margaret to stand beside her, and Ursula quieter, now, Hero walks the halls of the villa alone, some sour sadness brewing on the back of her tongue.)

The season comes to an end in this manner. When the cool wind of fall sneaks across Sicily, only the prince remains in the villa, all of his men gone on before him.

He arrives late to the front gate the morning he is meant to depart, with all of the household prepared to attend him. Hero stands beside her father as he appears out of the woods, hardly more than one of the dryads, himself.

He offers Leonato his best, though their parting handshake is an inadequate mirror of their embrace at the summer’s beginning. He manages a wry backwards look – the most jovial he’s appeared – after clambering atop his steady horse, though he directs it solely towards Hero.

“Look after my brother for me,” he asks as his horse carries him forth, a gallant pack of hounds following him forward.

Leonato nods, and Hero feels that familiar pang of regret; the question of a mistake brewing in the back of her mind.

They stay there as the prince’s horse kicks up dust down the road, and even after that dust has disappeared.

Leonato is the first of them to make his way inside. Hero glances back to watch him go, but she is in no rush to follow her father.

The sounds of the villa dampen around her. In the silence, she can hear the dryads giggling as the wind whistling through the trees.

*

Before the matter of her failed wedding sweeps from the minds of those in and around Messina, a messenger arrives at the villa, bearing with him news of war.

The message sends the house into an uproar. Leonato disappears behind closed doors to discuss things Hero dares not think on with some of his staff. She will, however, wander away from the villa, for a time, to stop and speak with Margaret, who has taken up work with a smaller home. The women sit and drink weak wine on the steps of the house, where Margaret rings her hands over the fate of her dear Baracchio.

Hero does not know the duty of a soldier, but she watches as the men of Messina gather their things, their faces grim. And when the lot of them line up near the edge of town, preparing to take to ships and head to the mainland, she makes a request of her father.

“Tell me: what are we to expect from this war?”

Her father – his hair thinner than it once was, and his complexion more drawn – takes some time to answer her. When he does, it is with a sigh as he straightens his own sword belt around his waist. They stand near the back of the troop, while, ahead, young woman give handkerchiefs and flowers and kisses to the boys wandering away from home.

“It is as the prince commands it to be,” Leonato says. He looks up from the port to the villa that she, now, will serve with his brother.

Hero knows, in her heart of hearts, that he is likely to come away from these encounters unharmed. Don Pedro is a forgiving lord; he knows the strengths and the weaknesses of his men.

Even so, as a whistle blows and the men march forward, she cannot stop herself from reaching out and grabbing her father’s hand.

“Be safe,” she says, squeezing as tight as she can. “Come home again.”

Leonato’s eyes soften – and for the first time in several months, Hero sees her father as he was before the summer’s endeavors. “Do not let Antonio run amok,” he replies, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. “I will see you again before you know it.”

Hero watches his back as he makes his way onto the ship. There, he is divided off into the officer’s quarters, greeted with a slap on the back and a smile from the men he must have known in his youth.

(The last expression she sees is one of sharp relief – and Hero cannot help but wonder what it means, when war is more of a refuge than a burden.)

The ships sail.

Weeks pass.

The women of the island, even those who scorn her, come together as they wait for news of their loved ones. The few men who remain on the island – a protective contingent – do not share what they know, leaving the fishwives and daughters to scrounge for information brought at the hands of wayward traders.

For all of the frustrations she bore in the summer, it is a fall full of unmatched discontent.

It is a stormy day when Hero’s temper finally breaks. She marches through the villa, the picture of Beatrice, even as her voice fails her. Her uncle, loving man that he is, can tell her no more than the fishwives, and the men her father left behind to protect them will tell her nothing.

The wind rocks the limbs of the trees beyond the perimeter of her home.

And Hero makes a decision.

In the chaos and the confusion that takes the villa in the storm, Hero slips from the house. The air fills with thunderheads and lightning as she ducks into the wood, just in time to avoid a fresh deluge of rain. Despite the fear and frustration pushing her forward, she trips over a root, smearing mud across her white linen and bruising her knees.

For a few breaths, this is where she stays, too winded to move. Her hands curl into the dirt, feeling the softness cave beneath her fingers.

But she makes her way to the willow grove, all the same.

The willow has lost a few branches from the storm. It whips around her as she ducks under its bows, slipping across her cheek and arms. The air around her, tight with lightning, feels –

Anticipatory.

Hero breathes in. Breathes out.

Thinks.

“There’s to be a war on the mainland,” she says, at last. “Your brother has requested men and supplies of my father. All of them have gone. What can you tell me of what is happening to them?”

A long moment passes. Thunder rumbles over Hero’s head, and she brings her arms around herself to fight off her shivers.

It is more than possible that he may not answer – that he may not be able to answer – but that does not mean that she cannot try.

Then, the willow –

Bends.

She cannot make out the intricacies, but in the bark and fronds there shows a body, and then a face and two dark eyes, peering at her as though through a cloud bank.

“Do you imagine me a prophet?” Don John asks her. His voice is rougher than she remembers – but that, Hero imagines, comes when you do not have the chance to speak for months at a time. “Or would you have me offer free musings for your entertainment?”

The ire in his voice trips some rabbit in her heart, but Hero plants her feet and meets his gaze. “Do you know what is happening to them?”

The image of Don John studies her. There is anger in his eyes, Hero can see that plain, but relief, as well. He leans in closer, the willow bending around him to permit him this limited movement.

“What will you give me in turn, good lady?” he all but sneers. “You and I have found a balance; what wrongs I did to you have been repaid.” Another willow frond smacks against Hero’s arm. “Give me something in return, and I will tell you what I can of war.”

Thunder cracks overhead. The rabbit in Hero’s heart begs her to flee, but she remains.

She has faced more frightening men before.

“I will tell you of Messina,” she says, at last. “You are right; I do not know how far your gaze stretches or if the dryads can make sense of life on the mainland. But you, lord, are lacking for entertainment. Given the opportunity, I will provide it for you, should you provide information for me.”

The image in the tree frowns, then looks at her again. She feels his dark eyes studying her and does not know, in the end, if she is found wanting.

The rush of the willow fronds seems to ease – if only a little.

“...trade your information, then,” Don John tells her. “Though I say again, lady: I am no prophet. Should the dryads deign to speak to me, they speak nothing of war. I can tell you only what I have learned from experience. But even so,” and here he glares, “should you fail to uphold the end of our bargain, I will deny you even that.”

It is – a strange offer, but a worthwhile one, or so Hero’s desperate heart believes. She forces herself to relax, even as the fall chill forces her to shiver.

“Are there any stories in particular that you would like to hear?”

The creature that is Don John comes to sit across from her. The willow groans as he stretches the limits of his bindings, but the binder is present in the grove. The tree makes its allowances.

When Don John does not answer, Hero breathes in.

And she speaks.

*

It may be the first time she seeks out the man in the willow tree, but it is not the last.

Hero returns to the villa with her heart steadied in her chest. She seeks out the women gathered by the docks and offers them up what little she knows – and what little Don John may suspect. Rumors of the best ways to move from Scila to Tropea; the confidence in knowing that should Don Pedro have called on his allies to the north, victory should be a straightforward thing.

The women rejoice at her borrowed cunning. Only when she returns to the villa does she think a moment on her dirtied dress and on her now-drenched locks.

When she returns to the willow grove but a few days later, she takes care to wear a dress made of sturdier stuff.

The grove does not welcome her as much as it does acknowledge her. The willow trunk shifts at her coming, and there is Don John again, staring out at her with eyes that are perhaps a touch clearer.

“More questions, lady?” he asks, voice full of disdain.

Had he not been so eager to speak to her in her last conversation, his voice cracked from disuse, perhaps Hero would fear him more. But there was a fire in his eyes when she left him the last, and that fire is growing brighter now that she’s returned.

It is with that fire catching light in her chest that she spreads an array of charts out on the ground before answering him. When she straightens again, it is to find him staring.

“I had tutors when I was younger,” she explains, motioning towards the collection. “But I mind a household now not only of women and workers but of those soldiers my father has left behind. So too do I expect that the wounded will return to us, if only when they are able.”

Don John is slow to look away from her, but the details on those carefully-preserved pages draw in his attention. Hero closes her eyes for an instant and thanks God that the ground is dry.

“...management fell to my brother, Lady Hero,” the creature that is Don John says, as though pained. “I do not know why you come to me for help, nor why I should feel inclined to give it to you.”

“I’ve come to you,” Hero says, “because you are a man familiar with wartime management. When you rebelled against your brother, you had to care for your men, did you not, or else lose their loyalty?”

Don John says nothing.

In his silence, Hero nudges one of the many arrayed small books in his direction. “Show me how to do the same,” she says, “and I will bring you whatever you might ask for.”

Again, she feels his scrutiny bearing down on her. Then, in the quiet of the grove:

“Would you let me go?”

Hero inhales, sharp. She can feel eyes shifting around her; the dryads pause in their frolicking, all of them seeming to listen at once.

When her silence drags on, Don John shakes his head.

“I will not content myself to these trades forever,” he tells her. “But come. Leave these with me. Keep me abreast of the news in the villa. And,” here he pauses. There is a twist to his mouth that disappears as quickly as it comes. “Well. It’s not at though I have anything better to do.”

(In her heart of hearts, Hero knows she is meant to feel relieved, but the sadness that thrums through her dampens the feeling like the rain does the vine.)

*

She receives a letter from Beatrice not a few days later. Her cousin bemoans the absence of her husband, though her loss is hidden by witty quips and reports from the land she now calls home. Guilty for not reaching out to her sooner, Hero bids Beatrice to make her way to the villa.

And Beatrice comes, in all of her splendid glory.

They walk the boundaries of the land arm in arm with one another, almost lighthearted enough to forget both the war and the passing of the now-distant summer. Beatrice bears a cloak that is both finer and heavier than any she wore in Leonato’s house, and Hero cannot help but feel glad for her.

“I imagine you attend Benedick’s affairs, cousin, now that his house is your own?” Hero asks as they watch Leonato’s workers pull in the last of the harvest.

Beatrice chuckles, but it is a quieter thing than Hero is used to.

“A good soldier to a lady he may have been,” Beatrice replies, “but a man of affairs he was not. But do not think, sweet Hero, that I would leave your home absent. We are but neighbors of a more distant sort these days. And as such, I will be in your company not but this evening and the next to better see the both of us through these strange times.”

In the distance, Hero hears a trumpet echo up the hillside. The wind whips the leaves behind her, turning the forest into a choir.

A messenger has arrived at the fort, not that his words will do her or the other women of the island any good.

“Well met,” Hero says, turning to glance at her cousin. “We’ll take pains to keep you from boring.”

Beatrice snorts. “I envy you not, cousin, for whatever roles our uncle has foist upon you in your later years; I miss ‘boring’ like I miss the comforts of an empty bed.”

Beatrice’s arrival at the villa makes tending to their lands more bearable. As her cousin flits in and out of the grounds, so too does Hero. She carries her father’s balancing book with her on her hip even in the rows of grapes, where his laborers (her laborers) touch their foreheads with respect.

Her uncle, Antonio, is her father’s younger brother, but he lets her go as he will, his capacity for children in any of their forms worn thin – but no less loving – in the time passed since her would-be marriage.

It is in his absence – or so Hero tells herself – that she continues to share her numbers with Don John.

She goes to the willow at noon and at night, careful to protect both bark and frond alike from the candles she carries. He walks her through the semantics of providing for a staff on rationed means, and in turn, she brings older wines from her father’s cellar to the trunk of his tree.

The first time he goes to drink, the whole of the willow shudders, and he pulls the bottle away from his mouth in disgust. The second time, Hero pours a full drink onto the willow’s roots. Don John watches as she does, and something in his face – shifts, though she is not able to identify what.

It becomes his preferred method of drinking with her, in the days that follow, though he notes that wine will not satiate his appetite for knowledge.

And an appetite he has.

“Do you imagine,” he asks her, as thunderheads roll in above the willow, “that I have much to keep myself occupied here? The speakings of the forest were interesting for the first day, but the birds and squirrels and even the trees themselves now have little to say that does not seem...tiresome.”

One of the dryads sticks her head out of her oak and sneers at him. Hero presses a hand to her smile as Don John makes a rude gesture back.

The semantics of their work is not lost on her. In the weeks that pass, Hero finds herself if not comfortable, then more familiar with the income and output of the vineyard than a young woman of her stature should be. She whispers words into her uncle’s ear when he meets with their partners. In turn, the villa’s rations feel less constricting than they would, were Antonio left to conduct business on his own.

But there is no compensating for the emptier fields and the quieter house. On the days when Beatrice attends to her own flocks, Hero walks the halls barefoot, one hand pressed against her chest, with her ears pricked for even the most simple of familiar sounds.

“It is a shame there is no point in hoping for a traveling band,” she says to Don John during one of their noontime rendezvouses. “Our funds may be limited, but it would do to have noise again.”

Don John hums, a non-committal noise. When Hero glances at him – busy, as she was, peeling one of the last of the summer oranges – he is paging through some of her father’s older books. She makes no move to stop him, nor does she comment on the stack he has pressed into his side. She raided their small library on his behalf and is – reassured (relieved) to see him taking an interest.

“What did you do to relieve boredom on campaign?” she asks, sliding a finger beneath her orange peel.

Don John does not look at her, but she can see him frown at his page. His finger pauses at the end of a sentence and lingers there.

“Forgive me,” he says, when the moment drags. “But you would not believe me if I told you.”

Hero tilts her head, unaware of the way her hair cascades over one shoulder.

Don John raises his gaze to her in her curious silence. He blinks, slow, like a cat, then sets his book aside.

He is right, in many respects – it takes several stories of the men’s attempt at theater for Hero to believe the truth of his words. Even then, it takes her enough time to press her bubbling giggles back into her throat at the thought of the men dressed as donkeys and distant kings that she misses the plot of John’s words and makes him, in turn, start again.

And in those stolen moments, laughter trapped behind his lips, he is human, more human than he ever was when he made his claim among the living. Hero feels her joy catch in her throat as she watches him tuck his memories away. There is quiet, then, in the aftermath, before he bids her go.

Hero walks back to the villa with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and does not let herself wonder at the lonely call of the woods.

*

(And she dreams, though she will not admit it, of the willow in the grove. The dryads dance around her in a late summer’s rain, taking her hands in theirs and kissing her bruised knuckles. Her fingertips stain their green skins with blood as they drag her towards the willow. It stands, quiet and steadfast, but Hero can hear the heart beating inside of it and feels -

Not fear, but something like it. Something deep and thrumming in her chest. Her lungs grow tight and her voice chokes off in her throat, as though the wind has stolen it away from her. All the while, she can feel the darkness pressing in on her – a funeral with no body, only blood on the chapel floor; only blood on a man’s forehead.

When she wakes, there are tears on her cheeks, but she is quick to pat them away before anyone can question how they got there.)

*

The weeks drag on, with fall giving way to the start of winter. Hero’s long disappearances from the villa do not go unnoticed by her uncle and staff, but given the pain they know that she has already suffered, no one makes a move to stop her.

The only one who tries is Don John. Even then, in between what he is able to teach her and she is able to tell him, it is not a direct rebuke of her behavior that would ward her from his grove.

Instead, it is the meeting of their eyes over a pile of books or a picnic basket, and the slow way his mouth forms those familiar words.

“Would you let me go?”

In the earliest of days, the words bring fear to Hero’s heart, and she pulls away from their quiet intimacy before the implications of his request reach her. As they settle, though, into a rhythm – with her candles burnt to nubs in the dark and more than one bottle of wine devoted to his roots – the question grow...sadder. No less frequent, for he would not be Don John if it did, but presented each day without fail, yet little more resigned.

He does not ask her, at the least, why it is that she denies him. While her words to the women in port have done her reputation some good, she still cannot take her walks nor trade nor even smile too broadly lest she feel burning eyes on her skin. The unmarried men of Messina watch her with a wanting eye, while the married women pull their husbands aside. Her name may have been cleared with Don John’s arrest, but Count Claudio, the townspeople know, would not make his home in the villa even if the war had not carried him away.

Something, then, must be wrong with her if she, proven innocent, still had no want for that fair-winded husband.

In this, they are mutual pariahs – the rebel bastard and the tainted daughter. Hero simmers in that kinship as the winter settles in earnest, sending fewer ships to their ports while the war in the north rages onward.

*

(And she’s lonely; by God, but is she lonely save for in those rare moments she is able to join him in the grove. She would hate to admit it, but even Beatrice’s distracted company leaves her wanting that retreat, wanting to rest beneath familiar fronds and let the rest of the world fade away for even a short time.)

*

“Would you do it again?” Hero asks, one evening, with the wine between the two of them nearly gone. Don John looks up, sharp, from one of her many books, his bark-lined mouth turning down in a frown.

Hero does not regret the fall of the words from her lips, but it’s hard not to shift as even the birds in the grove fall silent.

She is wrapped, in these cooler days, in as many layers as she can bear. Don John, however, is ever that picture of a summer youth – though the bark obscures his dress, she can still see that half-open shirt, those buttons that, even now, he refuses to tend to.

When he answers her, she can feel the weight of his consideration behind every word.

“You were the tool I needed in the moment. I do not regret what I did, but misusing you…” his words trail away, and Hero watches as he makes a study of the dying grass beneath her feet.

When he is not able to answer, her heart sinks in her chest. Hero stands, stretches, and looks down at the imprisoned man still on the ground at her feet.

“Would you let me go,” Don John asks, “not having your answer, but knowing that we are one in the same?”

“And how are we so?”

In that moment, Don John raises his black eyes to her. The knowing there almost shames her, but Hero has long gotten used to that manner of expression. She holds her back straight and only turns when the intensity she sees grows too hot – too unkind (too honest).

She leaves her books and wine behind her in the grove, only bidding the man goodnight before making her way back home.

*

(“If,” she says to the monaciello, before the sun has had a chance to pass over the horizon, “I wanted to release him, what would that require?”

The monaciello raises an eyebrow over his crust of bread. Pain sings through Hero’s chest, but she holds to her question.

After a long stretch of silence, the monaciello gives her the answer she seeks.)

*

It takes her several days to gather the courage she needs to return to the grove. On her day of choosing, she kisses the retiring Beatrice on the cheek, takes dinner with her household, and disappears until the last of the vintners have made their way to bed.

The Little Monk walks with her to the threshold of the house, his hand tucked into hers. Hero presses a kiss to his knuckles, then offers him a smile before disappearing into the night.

It doesn’t take long for the dryads to join her. They offer to carry her heavy basket, but she declines, taking only their company, instead.

The willow grove is quiet, though Hero knows – feels – Don John waiting for her. She hesitates just out of reach of the willow’s familiar fronds, but even the sharp bolt of fear through her heart cannot keep her from pushing forward.

Don John molds himself out of the tree trunk to stare at her, his black eyes as steady as they have ever been – but warier, now, in light of her absence.

Hero doesn’t start at the sight of him, but it is a near thing. After one heartbeat – then another – she sets her basket down at her feet.

The dryads flit from the clearing. The leaves do not fall, this far south, but the sky is crisp, as though it – for some reason – expects snow.

“Where will you go?” Hero asks, her voice naught but a whisper in the quiet.

“Anywhere,” Don John answers at once. “The sea. Anywhere where squirrels cannot reach me nor birds nest in my branches.”

Despite herself, Hero smiles. In the moonlight, it is difficult to tell whether or not Don John smiles back (but then again, it is always a challenge with him, the man who once proclaimed to wear his heart on his sleeve).

Hero steps forward and delicately unwraps the contents of her basket. Beneath the white linen, there is a sewing kit, and next to that, a bottle of wine.

Hero reaches down and weighs the bottle in her hand. Don John watches her, something quiet smoothing out the bark that is his skin.

The ritual – if it can be called that – does not call for this sort of thing. But Hero opens the bottle and pours until half of it has soaked the roots of the willow. Then, she presses the lip to her mouth and drinks.

The bottle is far from empty by the time she sets it aside, but the motion of it is enough. She feels Don John’s gaze on her and believes, for a moment, that she might be set alight.

As swift as a doctor, she pricks her finger.

Don John holds himself still as she crosses the space between them.

He does not touch her as she presses – gently – her ring finger to his forehead. His eyes only slip shut when her touch drags down his nose, against the supple bark covering his lips. Hero watches the blood still, then seep into the wood, disappearing almost as soon as she places it.

The wind in the grove dies. The wine beneath her feet is there one moment, then gone the next.

Don John opens his eyes and looks at her – really looks at her, to the point where Hero feels as though his gaze may be the only thing binding her to the spot.

“For what it’s worth,” he says in the quiet between them. One rough hand comes up to drag along her cheek. “No man could ever make you a ghost.”

Then, between the rise and fall of her eyelids, he is gone.

She is left in the space alone, nothing but a basket and a mostly-empty bottle of wine to keep her company.

The wind offers her peace for the few moments that it may. When it rises again, it brushes a willow frond against her lips.

There are tears there, though Hero cannot feel them, cannot understand the sudden emptiness in the world around her.

A dryad comes to take her hand. Hero turns with her, awash with nothingness, and finds that the tree spirits have gathered her things.

She leaves the bottle of wine with them. She carries the basket with both hands.

The walk from the willow grove is much quieter than the one to it, with nothing but the breaking of her heart in her ears to keep her company on her way home again.

*

Months pass.

The war drags on, Don Pedro’s forces taking unanticipated losses in the face of a prepared enemy. Hero’s source of information dries up, but Benedick’s letters, sent to Beatrice, give her more accurate information than the man in the willow ever could. He reports on the status of her father, still living, and lessens the speed at which her uncle’s hair whitens for his efforts.

She does not return to the willow grove. That is not to say she doesn’t not consider doing so. Rather, when noon comes and her tired feet move to take her to the edge of the forest, she finds herself brought up short watching the leaves rustling in the wind. The dryads smile at her, call to her, invite her to play – and yet, Hero feels her body turn away from that shady grove of its own accord.

Her eyes ache with the tears she sheds, though she takes care to keep them covered from all but the monaciello. The Little Monk stands vigil at the front windows with her on the nights when sleep won’t come and tells her stories, in that ancient language, of the world that came before her.

(And she does not forget, in that time, the lessons that the willow grove taught her. When her uncle is not looking, she balances the villa’s books. But in the same breath, she reaches out to those traveling bands passing by Sicily’s sand shores and hosts them, when her budget allows. There is dancing and singing in the villa, even though the meals are not as grand as they once were – and for that, Hero is proud.)

Winter turns to spring turns to summer without trouble coming to the island. In the midst of those early hot days, though, rumors begin to abound through the forest.

At first, Hero does not hear them. She is busy, as it stands, with their stored away supply – she gave away as much as she could during the lonely Christmas season, but she does not know now how to give the people of Messina what all they need.

But the dryads find her, when she walks near the villa’s perimeter, and tell her of the visitor stalking her lands.

“He rests in the willow grove,” says a chestnut tree, her hair sharp-sweet over deep bronze skin. “And he calls for the lady of the land to come and meet him, when she is able.”

As soon as she hears, Hero goes.

The land is lush with the coming of summer. The fronds of the willow grove do not hesitate to welcome her. She bears no basket nor bottle in her hand, just her open palms and her bare feet as she plunges forward, heedless of what dangers might await her.

He is there at the trunk of his old tree. There is a book in his hand – one long missing from Hero’s own library. He does not look up as she crashes through the brush, but even at a distance, Hero can see the shadow of a smile playing across his face.

By the time she arrives in the grove, she is red-cheeked and breathing heavily. Even so, she straightens and pushes her wayward hair out of her face.

“You sent for me, my lord?” she says.

When Don John looks at her, finger in the midst of his book, Hero feels the whole of her body smile.

“You took your time, lady,” he says, pushing himself to his feet. The book, Hero notices, is tucked into the pocket of his coat – and the coat itself is of a foreign make.

The space between them feels infinite in the silence that follows, but it is fond and thriving and -

“So did you,” Hero chastises.

When Don John grins, he looks almost like a boy save from the lines drawing tight around his eyes. Hero walks to him without a second thought and traces those creases under her thumb, only for them to soften, warm, and –

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think! Your comments make this challenge all the easier.


End file.
